SAN DIEGO (LN) — A federal judge sanctioned kratom marketer Ashlynn Marketing Group on Tuesday for wiping its consumer-facing blog from the internet without preserving copies — twice — finding the company's CEO ordered the deletion while a related class action was still pending and that additional content quietly vanished after plaintiffs in this case served a discovery request for the very same materials.
The ruling in J.J. et al. v. Ashlynn Marketing Group, Inc. centers on a blog hosted at KraveKratom.com that the company used to publish content on kratom's effects, dosing, and purchasing guidance — posts with titles including "Kratom for Pain Management" and "Best Kratom Strains to Break Your Present Kratom Cycle." Plaintiffs allege the company failed to warn consumers about kratom's addictive properties when marketing and labeling its products.
The trouble for Ashlynn began in May 2023, when an FDA investigator visited the company's office and flagged unidentified content from the blog. In response, CEO Wasem Saliman terminated the company's third-party blog contractor, Jet Rank, and ordered the blog deleted. That deletion came in July 2023 — while a separate class action asserting similar kratom misrepresentation claims was still active. The prior case was not dismissed until August 2023.
Ashlynn told the court the blog was gone as of July 2023 and that no archive or copies existed. That account fell apart. Plaintiffs' counsel, Luke Sironski-White, testified he accessed the live blog by typing the address directly into his browser in October 2024 — after this lawsuit had been filed. Wayback Machine screenshots then showed the blog index page publicly displaying content as of April 20, 2025. When plaintiffs checked again using the same tool, the page returned a 404 error message as of October 9, 2025 — after plaintiffs had served Ashlynn with a written production request for all blog materials.
The court took judicial notice of the Wayback Machine screenshots over Ashlynn's objection that the captures were "unauthenticated and inadmissible," joining what it called the apparent majority of district courts in this circuit that treat Internet Archive content as a proper subject for judicial notice under Federal Rule of Evidence 201. The court noted that Ashlynn "has not provided a good-faith basis to challenge the authenticity of Plaintiffs' Wayback Machine evidence" and that courts "generally have a dim view of authentication objections presented in the absence of any indication that the record's authenticity is genuinely in dispute."
Ashlynn also argued that Rule 37(e) spoliation sanctions cannot reach a blog that was "openly accessible to the public" because the rule is limited to private ESI uniquely within a party's control. The court rejected that reading flatly, warning that accepting it "would grant all litigants who operate a website free reign to scrub said websites of any relevant evidence after the commencement of litigation."
The court found intent sufficient to support sanctions under Rule 37(e)(2) — but stopped short of imposing a mandatory adverse inference instruction, concluding that lesser remedies under Rule 37(e)(1) were sufficient given that most blog posts remain viewable in archived form through the Wayback Machine. Instead, the court ordered that Wayback Machine captures may be admitted at trial and that the jury will be instructed they are authentic; barred Ashlynn from arguing the archived content is inadmissible or was not publicly posted during the class period; and directed that the jury be told Ashlynn had a duty to preserve the blog and removed it without copies after that duty attached. Ashlynn must also pay plaintiffs' attorney's fees and costs incurred in bringing the motion, with a fee declaration due within 30 days.
Ashlynn agreed to forensic discovery aimed at further reconstructing the blog, and the parties are set to meet and confer on the scope of that process.